This year will mark the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, Britain's acclaimed academy of science. Many of the society's members have exemplified leadership during the growth of the scientific revolution, with standout members including Sir Issac Newton, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, and Michael Faraday. Sadly, 350 years after the scientific revolution arguably began, we celebrate a bittersweet anniversary as it seems the lessons we learned during the enlightenment are quickly being forgotten by the masses, most clearly illustrated by the controversy surrounding global warming despite a well documented scientific consensus about its existence.

Last month, the Economist's Democracy in America blog posted an excellent article debunking a bogus claim about climate change. But the author's main argument--presumably made by a non-scientist--is about the limits of skepticism, which is elucidated about 3/4th through the post when the author rhetorically asks,

"Does the spirit of scientific skepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong? At what point am I allowed to simply say, look, I've seen these kind of claims before, they always turns out to be wrong, and it's not worth my time to look into it?"

As a society, how can we overcome the reckless abandonment of scientific ideals? Because skeptics can always fall back on the "what if it ISN'T true?" demon hypothesis scenario that is to some degrees valid, I tend to take a Bayesian position to resolve the notorious "problem of induction" in science and discern between good evidence and bad evidence. Even if we are to believe that statistics is among lies and damn lies, it seems to be the only effective way to identify good scientific knowledge in a world where it is virtually impossible to truly determine anything deductively (or a posteriori ). In a Bayesian sense, the best way to identify good scientific knowledge is to calculate the probability that a hypothesis is right against the probability that it is false, measured by the degree of evidence that supports it against the degree of evidence that opposes it. As the probability approaches 1, so should one's confidence that it is valid knowledge.

The scientific method has an impressive history, and I can only hope that its proudest moments are yet to come. Alas, my own worst skeptical inferences tell me that the way things are going, there is little evidence to support my optimism.

Published on March 10, 2010 in Science